How long did it take your baby to eat a good amount of solids?

[lulupop]

My DD is five and a half months and I have been trying solids on her for the last 2 weeks. I've started now because I'm getting tired of the constant feeding and want to get her to sleep more at night. Currently she sleeps quite well from 8pm-midnight but then wakes every 2 hours thereafter.

I started weaning with baby rice mixed with breast milk. Have also tried banana (with baby rice). These two went down OK, although it takes me 45 minutes to give her 1 teaspoon of baby rice with one tbsp milk.

Carrot, swede, apple and sweet potato are not popular.

I will just keep offering new things, as I know one rejection doesn't mean she doesn;t like it for ever, but am just wondering about how to get her to eat a little MORE. She is quite a small baby anyway, and is having plenty of milk. I've looked at Gina Ford's weaning book and she suggests that by the third week of weaning your baby will be having 2-3 CUBES of puree at a mealtime - my baby might have 2-3 spoonfuls!

Am pretty exhausted with the night times and desperate to get her eating more - how can I go about this without reducing the overall milk intake too much?

The recommendation from the World Health Authority is that babies shouldn't really be weaned until six months. Now, I'm NOT suggesting you are harming your baby in any way at all, but just to say, that Gina Ford is out of date and it's perfectly OK for a baby of your baby's age not to be eating any solids at all. I totally understand your desperation re the sleeping - my ds was even worse than your dd - honest! BUT I started weaning at 4months and it made no difference. He didn't sleep one bit better and in fact, never slept through until 8months - and he was a real porker. Solids are not the magical way to make babies sleep longer. They even have fewer calories that breast or formula milk, so why would they? Your dd really doesn't sound quite ready for solids yet and I wouldn't pin all your hopes on this solving your baby's sleeping problems. Someone I know found that hiring a maternity nurse for two nights as a troubleshooter worked to get her baby sleeping through the night. It cost about £500 but it worked. Does she have a good daytime routine with naps? How do you react when she wakes at night? Do you rush to her or wait and see if she settles herself? I know how grim it is and am slightly dreading no2 arriving in Feb.

Can't add much more to what Aloha has said really.
My DD started off like that, very blase about the whole thing. She just suddenly started to want the food, nothing I did made much difference.
Carrot etc not popular here either.

Both DDs didn't really take 2-3 cubes puree until about 7 months. Agree w/ Aloha, it isn't going to make much difference - not much correlation b/w solids during day and sleeping at night. I think you may just need to stick it out a few more weeks. Sorry, not the advice you want to hear.

I weaned dd before she even got to 4 months (a couple of years ago) because I'd believed the myth that they will sleep better once weaned (hah!). By 9 months she'd got up to eating 3 or 4 cubes at meal - lumpy by that point, and she'd munch toast etc, but quantity wise, about 4 cubes, max. She's 2.5 now and her biggest meal of the day is breakfast, for which she has 1/2 - 3/4 weetabix. Some people aren't big eaters!

But definitely don't look at weaning as the solution to the sleeping problem. With dd, she was used to having a feed when she woke at night, as her way of getting back to sleep again. She had to learn how to sleep without mummy feeding her, and that was hard! About 3 months of lots of screaming (and cuddles, and bottles of water, and rocking, and daddy holding her, and picking-up-and-putting-down, and controlled crying...). Aagh. You have my sympathy Lulupops!

And I'm having another one. What am I doing? No! This one will sleep!

I tried my dd at four months but to be honest she wasn't really interested. From what I acn remember it was between five and six months when she showed an interest,

Jer favourites were carrot and apple and to this day she loves nothing more than stewed apple or a bowl of carrots!

i must just be lucky because my dd is 8 mth and will eat anything!!! lol what i did at first not to drop any milk was i would offer her half her bottle then some food then the other half of bottle... she now has 3 food meals aday... breakfast large tub of porridge or half a weetabix lunch a full jar of hipp food and 2 yogurts and supper she will have another jar of food and maybe a banana she also has 4 8oz bottles a day. at first i just stuck to using the packets of dried food and would just mix a small amount then if she finished that would maybe mix some more. it was only when a packet of dried food was only lasting 2 days i swapped to jars.it is hard at first to judge how much etc.. and im afraid it is just trial and error as regards what they like/dislike. xx

I'd give it a rest if I were you, my DD also didn't sleep but ate nothing from a spoon until 10 months! I managed some finger food before then and tried the spoon now and then until she finally accepted it. There was far less stress just sticking with the milk. To be honest by the time she accepted eating off a spoon she was ready to eat the same as us and had missed the puree stage and then sleeping through did follow soon after - it was probably alot less effort letting her go at her own pace even though it felt like she was the only child her age who didn't eat.

DD is 7 months and started weaning at 6. She doesn't like most purees, although she'll eat a little bit of the tastier ones. She will eat more finger food, but still nothing like the amounts people mention. Every time I see something that says "At first they may take only a few teaspoonfuls" I feel terrible -- at first she took positively homeopathic amounts, and now she takes teaspoonfuls of things she likes. Which, by the way, does not include baby rice, mashed bananas, or avocados. She will eat small amounts of baby carrots, but she's actually enthusiastic about carrot-ginger soup thickened with baby rice. Grown-up carrot-ginger soup, with little lumps and tiny visible bits of onion. That's good for maybe a cube's worth, as are most finger foods (toast, bread crusts, cereal, raw fruit chunks (steamed usually no go), boiled potato cut into fingers, beans). And little miss "mashed bananas are icky" will chew on a lime wedge for 10-15 minutes at a time! It would be nice if she'd eat more, and periodically I think it's just me, but she's just the same at nursery. I figure she'll grow into it and we'll keep trying foods.

As for sleeping, our giant triumph last night was to get her to go
8-midnight and every 2 hours thereafter, after nearly a week where it was 2 hours max, getting down to every hour by 7 am. I don't know exactly what worked last night or whether it will keep working, but I can guarantee you it wasn't extra solids, because she hardly ate any yesterday. It could have been extra nursing before bed or sleep training the night before.

I think you're all right about solids not actually making a lot of difference to sleeping through the night, as now I think of it I remember it didn't make any difference to DS' sleeping.

DD not bothered and it is one more thing to worry about in an already rather wearying day, so have decided to leave it for another couple of weeks now.

That said, how long (in terms of minutes spent) does it actually take you to give your baby, say a teaspoon of baby rice with a tbsp of milk?

well, i started ds on solids with 15 months. not to make him sleep through but he wanted constantly feeding. and formula is a bit on the heavy side! so i have to give him something else instead! he didn't like babyrice either!! he loves carrots/potatoes (i always mix it with a bit of babyrice/milk) and fruitpurres with rice/milk! - since he was always quite hungry: 1spoonfull = less than 2seconds (8oz bottle goes down in 5 min grin) - he was happy with solids for 3 weeks and went off it completly again! had to start over with spoon by spoon ... and now wk20 i can't shove the spoon quickly enough into his little mouth

started ds on solids at 6 months but he really showed very little interest in them until about 9 months. It made absolutely no difference in his sleeping anyway. I've read that in the beginning stages of feeding it is more to get them used to different tastes and textures than anything else. Nutritionally the BM still should be giving her all she needs at this point.

lulupop, I haven't read all the other replies, so sorry if I'm repeating what someone else says. My dd took AGES to eat a substantial amount of 'solids', she's 2 now and is still a small eater. Just keep offering little and often (the GF guide drove me more and more nuts as dd NEVER ate what she suggested. I also wanted to remind you that almost all the first foods you give your dd are not as filling OR nutritious as milk so are unlikely to make her sleep longer.

In terms of how long it takes for them to eat a teaspoon of something I think it depends on how hungry they are, how easily their swallow reflex works and how much they like the taste of what you give them.